Two Captive Audiences

I feel like I'm cheating. Like this is just too much awesome to be fair. 

Also, I don't know why I didn't think of this years ago. 

I've got two beta reader groups (7 to 10-year-old kids, right in the target audience) reading my WIP The First Kid on Mars and giving me instant feedback. And I mean instant.

(record scratch) You're probably wondering how I got here.

Well, even if you're not, I'll tell you. I've been a K-8 drama and audio/visual arts teacher at a Chicago public school for a long time. I make movies and play drama games with kids, and I direct the school musical every year. And now my kids are students at the same school I teach at-- one in first grade, and one in fourth.

It's fun to see them in the hall sometimes, and it's a blast to make movies and play games with them, and they both had fun in Mary Poppins.

Earlier this school year, I signed up to be a guest parent reader for my son's first grade class. Usually the guest reader brings a favorite book from home or picks one out from the classroom library, but I thought it would be fun to read them the first chapter of The First Kid on Mars.

And it was. 

They sat quietly, listening the whole time. If you've ever spent time in a first grade classroom, you know this is not a common occurrence. They told me they loved it and asked me sharp questions about how and why I wrote it, what's going to happen next, and when it's going to be a real book.

They asked me to come back to read chapter two. I did, and they loved that too. 

I ran into the teacher in the teacher's lounge after that, and asked if I could sign up for more guest reader times. Like maybe once a week, and read all twenty chapters by the end of the school year? It's easy for me to stop by during my lunch break, and it keeps her students quiet and focused for twenty or thirty minutes. 

If you've ever spent time in a first grade classroom, you know what her answer was. 

So once a week, I read them a chapter and watch their expressions as they listen. I can see when they sit up and lean forward; I can see when they get bored. When we're done with each chapter, they can ask me questions and I can ask them questions. 

After chapter two, his sister found out and got jealous. She asked her teacher if I could come in to read it to her class too. 

Her teacher also did not mind if I kept her students quiet for twenty or thirty minutes once a week. 

And now her class tells me they love it too. And they're giving me great feedback and asking great questions.

And now I get to do this twice a week. That's a lot of awesome.

Taylor's Not the Only Famous Swift in the Family

 You may have heard of my cousin, who got famous for growing up on a Christmas Tree farm and now sings songs or something, I think. I hear she gets recognized at airports and football games, and I bet people scream her name when they see her all the time. 

Well, she's not the only one. 

We were walking on the sidewalk in front of our school the other day (I teach there and both of our kids attend), when I heard someone scream my name from behind us. 

"Is that Mr. Swift, the author!?!"

We turned to see who my fan was. It wasn't a tween or a Gen Z fangirl, but a middle-aged man with maybe even more grey in his beard than I have in mine.

He's also the father of twins in my daughter's fourth-grade class; we've known each other for years, and he's never seemed starstruck at all. But on this day, his daughters had just finished telling him about THE FIRST KID ON MARS. 

Earlier that day, I read chapter one to their class - my daughter asked her teacher, and we've got plans to read the whole thing together one chapter at a time before the end of the school year. I talked about the process, plans for future books in the series, and hopes to publish soon. 

The students loved the first chapter - they were an incredibly good and attentive audience while I read, and they had great questions and comments afterwards. 

(I'm reading it to my son's first-grade classroom too - it's intended for a slightly older audience, but they're loving it too. We asked his teacher first, so they're up to chapter four already.)

So I guess the twins must have said some nice things about the book, because he seemed genuinely impressed that it made such an impression on them.

In fact, come to think of it, he probably wanted my autograph. I should be ready to give it to him next time. 

I should ask cousin Taylor what to charge.

The Second-Best Selling Author in the Family

Last Friday my son's first-grade teacher did a pretty awesome thing.

She threw a book launch party for her students, to celebrate the book they wrote and she published.

All the parents (and some brothers & sisters) showed up, the kids all got "so-and-so is a published author" certificates, there were lots of shiny balloons, and there was even a little charcuterie board.

Each student wrote and illustrated one page about an animal that lives in the jungle. There was some bonus content too, of course - each student also had a packet of drafts, research, and sketches for their page. 

The best part was seeing how proud all the kids were. My son woke up Friday morning, and the first thing he said after jumping up out of bed was, "Today's the day of my publishing party!"

It's a great book. It's fun to not be the only published author in the family anymore. 

And now that I've sent the link out to friends and family, he'll probably outpace me in royalties in a couple of days. 

How's That Resolution Going?

 

Resolutions

Happy New Year!

I posted a few goals for 2025 on Bluesky and Twitter as 2024 came to an end the other day, and I wanted to put them out into the universe here too. 

The biggest one is publishing THE FIRST KID ON MARS with Big Sea Books. This is the story that brought me back to writing for the first time since I was a kid, and it's the story that my kid fell in love with as I was writing it. I'll be editing/revising this spring, and the plan is to publish it by the end of the school year. 

I've only been able to write a little bit of SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN in the present so far - the rest exists only in my imagined future. I'm planning to catch up to that future this year, with a full first draft complete before the calendar flips again.

With three published short stories (BLUE SKIES and FROM NOW ON in The Accidental Time Travelers Collective Vol. 1 and Vol. 3, respectively, and DAY TEN in the first issue of Bunker Squirrel Magazine), I'm starting to feel like a real writer. I've got two more ready to publish this year (BLIND LUCK and (almost) out of the woods), and a whole bunch more in the works. How many can I get published this year?

Speaking of Bunker Squirrel Magazine, I'm planning to submit a flash fiction piece based on their prompts every month. You should too - it's run by great people, and it's putting some great writing out into the world. 

I want to write more haiku this year. Lots and lots and lots of haiku. I gave my parents a @haikuformykids calendar, and maybe it's time to start selling them somewhere. 

And finally, I want to blog more regularly. I guess I can check that off my list.

For today, anyway.

Summer Mode

Summer, I posted the other day, has begun.

Since I was a little kid, I've spent at least some time visiting family in Maine every summer. Now that I've got little kids of my own, I'm grateful that I get to bring them to this magical place. In the spring of 2020, we packed up the car and came out here for what turned out to be a four-month respite; a small town on the coast of Maine was a much better way for two young kids to endure a worldwide pandemic than our crowded Chicago neighborhood. 

That was a strange spring, and it was a wonderful summer.

It was also a reminder that we could do this every year. My wife and I are both teachers (my parents were teachers, too, and it still seems strange to me that normal people have to work in the summer), and this seemed like a lot more fun than the summer teaching gigs we'd pick up in the Before Times.

This year we stayed in Chicago for a few weeks after the school year ended to see friends and enjoy summer in the city. It was fun--Chicago is a fantastic summer town, packed with block parties, movies in the parks, and beautiful beaches--but it didn't really feel like summer to me. 

We left on Canada Day, coincidentally camping in Canada that night so we could spend a day at Niagara Falls (10/10 by the way, I should write a bit about that amazingness) before arriving at my forever summer home. It just feels right here, you know?

The first morning, we took the canoe across the Creek (we call it the Creek, but it's a lot more impressive than that makes it sound--it's actually a branch of the Kennebec River, a few hundred yards upstream of where it feeds into the Atlantic Ocean) to a magical sand bar beach that only appears at low tide.

We have a routine there: we all get out on the pristine sand, I haul the canoe up far enough that the rising tide won't take it before it's time to go home, and we spend a few hours playing in the gentle waves. If we get the timing right, small islands appear briefly as the water rises; I wrote one of my favorite haiku about that moment a few years ago.

Now it feels like summer. 

Don't Judge a Book by Its--Actually, Go Ahead

I may have pantsed my way into a cover reveal on Twitter yesterday. 

Let me explain.

I started playing with ideas for the cover of THE FIRST KID ON MARS a few days ago. I'm not an illustrator, but I figured I could find my way around Canva well enough to put something together. 

After a few days, I finally created something that expressed the idea in my head: a teddy bear sitting on the surface of the red planet. It wasn't really very good, but I didn't hate it. 

So I posted it on Twitter, thinking I'd get some feedback on the concept that might help me figure out how to move forward. 

I never could have expected what happened next. 

A complete stranger, who happens to be an illustrator in Germany, saw my post and the comments and replied:

I got inspired by your concept and had a little fun as a daily challenge. 😊
It's yours if you like it.

I do like it. I like it a lot. I need to give it some thought and figure out some logistical things, but I think we may have just accidentally revealed the cover of my first book. 

What do you think?